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The landing page is probably one of the most important pages on your website. A slight change in your conversion rate could mean a world of difference between dying from panic or sipping a mojito at the beach. Yet… designing a high-converting landing page is tough. There are so many elements to get right: the copy, the design, the images, the structure, and so on. It’s overwhelmingly tough. The good news is — you don’t have to design landing pages from scratch. You can actually model other people’s landing pages. Find out what they did right, analyze what they can…

A/B testing and conversion rate optimization (CRO) are not synonymous, but often confused.

A/B testing is exactly what it says—a test to verify different sets of variations on your website. Conversion rate optimization, however, is much more than just testing.

Conversion optimization is a scientific process that starts with analyzing your business’ leaks, making educated hypotheses to fix them, and then testing those hypotheses.

Conversion optimization is a process that needs to be repeated, but A/B testing is a technique. A formalized conversion optimization process can advance somewhat like this:

Tracking metrics and identifying what parts of the conversion funnel need fixing

Analyzing why visitors are doing what they are doing

Creating and Planning your hypotheses for optimization

Testing the hypotheses against the existing version of the website

Learning from the tests and applying the learning to the subsequent tests

To further clear up the air around the two terms, we got in touch with the top in line conversion rate experts and picked their brains on the same. The experts tell us about their experiences with A/B testing and conversion optimization and why you should switch to the latter.

Quotes from Conversion Rate Experts

Back in 2007, I could already see that a huge gap was developing among companies that are perfecting a process for conversion optimization and those that are following the easy advice of so many consultants.

Instead of selling top-of-mind advice, I focused WiderFunnel on refining the process of continuous optimization for leading brands. For each of our client engagements, we run a holistic CRO program that builds insights over time to continuously improve our understanding of their unique customer segments. The results speak for themselves.

Ad hoc A/B testing is a tragic use of your limited traffic when you realize how much growth and insights structured optimization program could be delivering. In an example that we published recently, a structured CRO program is exactly what this company needed to double its revenue two years in a row, over the ad hoc testing it was previously doing.

The most effective conversion optimization program seeps into the bones of your organization. Decisions that were once exclusively creative in nature gain a data component. Much of the guessing drains from your online marketing. We call this “rigorous creativity,” and it marries your best marketing work with insights about your visitors. It cannot be accomplished by running a few tests, but comes from asking daily, “Do we have some data to help guide us? If not, can we collect it?” The rigorously creative business is good at finding and creating this data and using it to maximize visitor satisfaction and business profit.

Without a strong CRO strategy that encompasses the experience visitors have discovering, using, exploring, and hopefully eventually converting on your site, you’ll always be plugging holes in a leaky bucket rather than building a better container.

The best opportunities to improve conversion usually aren’t from changing individual pages one at a time with a multitude of tests, but rather by crafting a holistic, thoughtful experience that runs throughout the site, then iterating on elements consistently with an eye to learning, and applying knowledge from each test to the site as a whole.

An AB test should come at the end of your homework. If you’re just AB testing, you’re probably gambling. Your tests are based on things you’ve read on the Internet, gut feeling, and opinions. Some of your tests will be winners, most of them losers. Because you’re shooting blanks.

The homework is data analysis and user research. This will reveal the problem areas and why your visitors are leaving or not doing what you want them to do. The better you know the dreams, the hopes, the fears, the barriers, and uncertainties of your users, the better you’ll be able to work out a test that will have a real impact.

In case you’re in doubt, impact seldom comes from design changes. Don’t change the color of your button, change the text on that button. Not randomly, but based on what users want and your knowledge of influencing people.

Don’t focus too much on the design. Focus on your offer, your value proposition, and how you sell your stuff.

Don’t sell the way you like to sell. Sell the way your customers want to buy.

André Scholten, SEO and Site Speed specialist, Google Analytics

Create a strategy that makes your clients happier and don’t focus on the money. Single non-related tests on the conversion funnel follow each other up, based on abandonment rates, judged on their influence on revenue. That’s not a strategy but more an operational process where test after test is conducted without vision. You should create a test culture within your company that tests everything that will make your website a nicer place for your customers. Give them feedback possibilities with feedback or chat tools to learn from these. Take their wishes into account and create tests to verify if their wishes are met. Create a test strategy that focuses on all goals: not only the money, but also information-type goals, contact-goals, etc. It will give you so much to do and to improve. That’s a holistic approach to testing.

“Winging it” may work for musicians and cooks; but in marketing, any decision made outside of a holistic CRO program is a bad one. Only through testing will you find the right message, the right audience, and the right offer. And only after you nail these critical elements will you see the profits you need. It doesn’t matter how small or new your business is, take time to test your ideas. You’ll be glad you did.

To say an online business is great due to AB Testing is like saying a Football team is great because of their stadium. It is the entire team framework that leads to winning. An optimization frameworkintegrates A/B testing as one component that includes the team, the brand, advertising, and a solid testing strategy. This is how industry-leading websites win year after year.

Rich Page, Conversion Rate Optimization and Web Analytics Expert

Many online businesses make the mistake of thinking that A/B testing is the same as CRO and don’t pay enough attention to the other key aspects of CRO. This usually gives them disappointing results on their conversion rates and online revenue. Web analytics, website usability, visitor feedback, and persuasion techniques are the other key CRO elements that you need to frequently use to gain greatest results.

Gaining an in-depth visitor feedback is a particularly essential part of CRO. This helps you discover your visitor’s main needs and common challenges, and forms high-impact ideas for your A/B tests (rather than just guessing or listening to your HiPPOs). Gaining visitor insights from usability tests and watching recordings of them using your website is particularly revealing.

Just about every statistic on A/B test results says that most tests don’t create positive results (or any results at all). That’s partly because of the inherent uncertainties of testing. But a big part is the usual lack of a real plan.

Actually, you need two plans.

The first plan, the big picture one, is there to keep you focused on testing the right parts of your marketing. It tells if you should spend most of your energy on testing landing pages, prices, or perhaps webinar content.

The second plan is there to make sure you’re creating impactful differences in your tests. So instead of testing two headlines that mean essentially the same thing (e.g. “Get good at golf fast” and “Improve your golf skills quickly”), you test things that are likely to create a different conversion rate (e.g. “3-hour practice recommended by golf pros”). And when you see increased or decreased conversion rates, you create the next test based on those results.
With good plans, you can get positive results from 50–75% of your tests.

Roger Dooley, Author of Brainfluence

Simple A/B testing often leads to a focus on individual elements of a landing page or campaign – a graphic, a headline, or a call to action. This can produce positive results, but often distracts one from looking at the bigger picture. My emphasis is on using behavior science to improve marketing, and that approach works best when applied to multiple elements of the customer journey.

Conversion rate (CR) is a measure of your ability to persuade visitors to take action the way you want them to. It’s a reflection of your effectiveness and customer satisfaction. For you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs. Conversion rate, as a metric, is a single output. CR is a result of the many inputs that make up a customer experience. That experience has the chance to annoy, satisfy, or delight them. We need to optimize the inputs. Ad hoc A/B tests cannot do this. Companies that provide a superior experience are rewarded with higher conversion rates. Focus on improving customer experience, and you’ll find the results in your P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow statements.

Thinking beyond the individual A/B test as optimization is a natural part of gaining experience. We all probably started off by running a handful of ad hoc tests and that’s okay—that’s how we learn. However, as we grow, three things may happen which bring us closer towards becoming more strategic:
1. We become conscious of ways in which we can prioritize our testing ideas.
2. We become conscious of the structure of experiments and how tests can be designed.
3. We think of a series of upcoming tests which may or may not work together to maximize returns.

Here is one example of one test strategy/structure: The Best Shot Test. It aims to maximize the effect size and minimize the testing duration, while doing so at the cost of a blurred cause-effect relationship.

Running basic A/B tests based on best practices is okay for a start. But to really get to the next level, it’s important to see how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. This gives us a better understanding of what exactly we’re testing for and reach for results that fit the specific goals of the organization.

Kristi Hines, Certified Digital Marketer

Depending on your business and the size of your marketing team, you may want to go beyond just testing your website or a landing page. You may want to expand your A/B testing to your entire online presence.

Why? Because here’s what’s going to happen. If you have consistent messaging across a bunch of channels that someone follows you on, and all of a sudden, they come to your landing page with an inconsistent message (the variant, if you will), then they may not convert simply because of the inconsistency of your message. Not because it wasn’t a good message, but because it wasn’t the message they were used to receiving from you.

As my own personal case example, when I change my main phrase “Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, business blogger, and certified digital marketer.” I don’t do it just on my website. I do it everywhere. And I don’t do it for just a week. I do it for at least two to three months unless it’s a complete dud (i.e., no leads in the first week at all).

But what I usually find is when I find a good phrase, I’ll start getting leads from all over the place. And usually they will say they went from one channel to the next. Hence, don’t just test. Test consistency across your entire presence, if possible. The results may be astonishing.

I do think that Conversion Rate Optimization as a marketing discipline goes beyond just a series of A/B and/or Multivariate tests. As external factors such as your brand and what other people say about the business (reviews and referrals) can also heavily impact how a site can perform in terms of attracting more actions from its intended users/visitors.

For instance, positive social proof (number of people sharing/liking a particular product or a brand on different social networks) can also influence your customer’s buying process. And improving on this aspect of the brand involves a whole different campaign – which would involve a more holistic approach to be integrated to your CRO program. Another factor to consider is the quality of traffic your campaign is getting (through SEO, PPC, paid social campaigns, content marketing, etc.) The more targeted traffic you’re able to acquire, the better your conversions will be.

Your Turn

A full-fledged conversion optimization program goes a long way and is a lot more beneficial than ad hoc testing.

So what are you waiting for? Let stepping up to conversion optimization be your #1 goal in the new year.

These emails get engagement because they are so clearly from one vulnerable human to another. They remind us that we’re speaking to a human, not a company.

And for marketers, they give the opportunity to connect with our audience and provide even more delight — by poking fun at ourselves or offering up something more (like an additional discount).

Open yourself up to failure and rejection

In the spirit of messing up, Aaron Orendorff of iconiContent had a thing or two to say about what makes for good content.

Contrary to what most people might think, you don’t always want to focus on success in your content. Sometimes, highlighting your failures can be more impactful.

This doesn’t necessarily work for all content (you wouldn’t want a hyper-tactical post about how to fail, would you?), but if you want impactful brand-defining content, you’re gonna have to be willing to air your dirty laundry.

Be bold and dare to break things

For most content marketing teams, the idea of simply freezing all content production sounds like a recipe for disaster. (Or a recipe for getting fired.)

But for Uberflip, it was about a shift in priorities. As their VP of Marketing Hana Abaza explained, more content doesn’t necessarily mean more results. It might just mean more wasted effort.

So they stopped producing content for three weeks, and instead focused on how they could optimize their existing content for more conversions. That meant putting better calls to action on high-traffic, low-converting content, and driving more traffic to posts that were already converting well.

If you want to run any kind of experiments, you have to be prepared for failure.

But being accepting of failure gives you the power to make bigger and bolder bets.

I’ll make you a deal: turn off the Netflix and watch the fourth instalment of The Landing Page Sessions instead. Don’t worry, you get to keep the Cheetos.

If you’ve been living under a proverbial rock (or a literal one for that matter) and haven’t heard of The Landing Page Sessions, let me enlighten you: they’re short 15- to 20-minute videos, each dissecting a real-world marketing campaign all the way from the referring ad or email to conversion. And they’re starring none other than Brad Pitt Oli Gardner, Unbounce Co-Founder and landing page savant.

By showing you how to improve real-world campaigns, Oli takes the high-level theoretical blabber and turns it into actionable tips and tricks that you, too, can implement to improve your prospective customers’ marketing funnel experience.

If, on the other hand, you did check out the first three episodes, you’re probably fiending for more — amirite?

Well you’re in luck, because we’ve got another killer episode to feed your craving, and this one is all about the mobile experience.

Episode 4: Game of Phones

Cheap1300Number offers toll-free 1300 numbers at a low cost, but its mobile landing page is garbage. No, like, there’s an actual garbage can on the page — not exactly the hero we envision. In this episode, Oli discusses hero images, the importance of a clear call to action and how to optimize a landing page for the mobile experience… all within the Unbounce landing page builder.

And if you missed last week’s episodes and want to catch up (don’t worry, you don’t need to watch chronologically), go check ‘em out. And eat a Cheeto for me.

5 years ago when our Founder, Paras Chopra, realized the opportunity gap for an “easy-to-use” A/B testing software in the industry, he didn’t know how big it’s going to be. He tried to solve a pain point and it worked: VWO is today a known name in the industry.

Now when we look back at how things have changed over time, testing has become a part of the culture for those who understand how powerful it is. No data-driven online business can ignore it.

A/B testing has become a small niche in itself. And we did a short survey in the VWO app to understand our industry (and specifically our customers) better. Here are a few key data points/insights that stood out for us:

1. eCommerce industry is using A/B testing most actively. 39% of VWO customers are from the eCommerce industry. (Click to tweet)

3. Average conversion lift for statistically significant tests is 49 per cent. (Click to tweet)

4. 40% of testers in VWO create a test within an hour. This includes time taken in doing the research for test idea to making it live! (Click to tweet)

5. “Power testers” comprises of 5% of our active user base. In the first quarter of 2014, these “power testers” alone had set up close to 600 tests, which is 8 times more than usual testers. (Click to tweet)

6. Average revenue per unique visitor for eCommerce sites is $3. A successful A/B test usually increases it up to 50%. (Click to tweet)

7. Almost 30% of testers would like to start with testing a call-to-action button (Click to tweet). This is followed by headlines (20%), Layout (10%), and website copy (8%).

8. A typical A/B test runs for more than one week but not more than two months. (Click to tweet)

9 women can't give birth to a baby in 1 month. Your boss can say "test faster", but it's not going to change the way math works. #abtesting

We’ve come a long way since the time VWO was first launched on HN. This survey was just a small attempt to see where we’re headed as an industry. The points mentioned above definitely reveal some trends. We will continue to share more data/insights in future and contribute to a culture of transparency for everyone to benefit from it.

Your Turn

What do you think about these data points/insights? Do you have any interesting observations to share from your tests? It’s time we get talking in the comments section.